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Django Blog Tutorial - the Next Generation - Part 9

Yes, I know the eight instalment was meant to be the last one! Within 24 hours of that post going live, Django 1.7 was released, so naturally I’d like to show you how to upgrade to it.

The biggest change is that Django 1.7 introduces its own migration system, which means South is now surplus to requirements. We therefore need to switch from South to Django’s native migrations. Fortunately, this is fairly straightforward.

First of all, activate your virtualenv:

$ virtualenv venv

Then make sure your migrations are up to date:

$ python manage.py syncdb

$ python manage.py migrate

Then, upgrade your Django version and uninstall South:

$ pip install Django --upgrade

$ pip uninstall South

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Next, remove South from INSTALLED_APPS in django_tutorial_blog_ng/settings.py.

You now need to delete all of the numbered migration files in blogengine/migrations/, and the relevant .pyc files, but NOT the directory or the __init__.py file. You can do so with this command on Linux or OS X:

That resolves the error in serving static files, but not the error with the admin. If you run the dev server, you’ll be able to see that the admin actually works fine. The problem is caused by the test client not following redirects in the admin. We can easily run just the admin tests with the following command:

There are two main issues here. The first is that when we try to edit or delete an existing item, or refer to it when creating something else, we can no longer rely on the number representing the primary key being set to 1. So we need to specifically obtain this, rather than hard-coding it to 1. Therefore, whenever we pass through a number to represent an item (with the exception of the site, but including tags, categories and posts), we need to instead fetch its primary key and return it. So, above where we try to delete a post, we replace 1 with str(post.pk). This will solve a lot of the problems. As there’s a lot of them, I won’t go through each one, but you can see the entire class above for reference, and if you’ve followed along so far, you shouldn’t have any problems.

The other issue we need to fix is the login and logout tests. We simply add follow=True to these to ensure that the test client follows the redirects.

About me

I'm a web and mobile app developer based in Norfolk. My skillset includes Python, PHP and Javascript, and I have extensive experience working with CodeIgniter, Laravel, Django, Phonegap and Angular.js.